Virginia Woolf - Hemione Lee, Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason, John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, Kingsley Amis - Memoirs

Sometimes you wake slowly and drowsily, with a feeling of warmth and bliss, in a blessed state that is only punctured by the curse of rising that destroys all the comfort and reach of your rest. Today after this, after the trip in the car to the station I went back to bed, sneaking back under the covers. When I finally had to get up I started reading Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee's dense but accessible biography and thought yet again how reading, writing and thinking are the things that can lever me out of the slough of despond*. Having read so much (but not all) Woolf the biography is full or references that I can nod at, or at least know that I can link something I have read of Woolf's to what is being said which is very satisfying. I read the part where Lee discusses the interiority of Virginia Woolf's autobiographical writing, how she saw that the external public maw in which men operate was the only biographical shape that was extant - live, emotional inner worlds - and by design and by chance therefore almost all of womens' lives are excluded, never told.

The next chunk that I read was about her memories of staying at Talland House in St Ive's, these beautiful impressionistic descriptions of the yellow blind, the acorn like end of the string that pulls the blind sliding across the floor and the rhythm of the waves, descriptions that she retells and reworks and which to me sum up the wonder of The Waves (necessarily!), the book of her that I read as a wash of sensation and beauty.

I've also just read the introduction to Kant's  A Critique of Pure Reason , the reason being that a friend of my eldest son wants to have a reading group to tackle this and there is something very attractive about actually thinking about thinking, and making sense of what it is that we do that makes us human, perhaps.

I've also added a quote below from Pilgrim's Progress, an edition of which I may still have somewhere, unloved and unread, but some of his images are so part of common parlance that we use them without thinking. I've always found it unreadable though - it does remind me of Kingsley Amis quoting Philip Larkin's attitude towards early english poems - "'apes bumfodder'" . Amis's summary is below:

"All Old English and nearly all Middle English works produced hatred and weariness in everybody who studied them"

They had the added burden of being lectured to by Tolkien who was "incoherent and often inaudible" - I had to add that - God knows what Amis thought of Lord of the Rings. It does seem to me that many so called classics are there just because they are there, just because at a certain point in time they got admired and then the admiration sort of ossified around them. I have the same kind of feelings about Citizen Kane - supposed to be one of the best films ever made, but I've never got more than half way though before turning off out of boredom and incredulity that it is so admired.

* "This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground."

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress